FDA Commissioner Calls For Passage of Stalled Legislation On Food Safety

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg is calling on Congress to pass stalled legislation to give her agency more tools to ensure food safety and prevent dangers such as the salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds of people and led to the recall of hundreds of million of eggs.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg is calling on Congress to pass stalled legislation to give her agency more tools to ensure food safety and prevent dangers such as the salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds of people and led to the recall of hundreds of million of eggs. Hamburg said her agency needs the authority granted in the proposed legislation to order recalls, instead of relying on private businesses –– such as Hillandale and Wright County Egg –– to pull back products on their own.

The House passed food safety legislation in July 2009 and a Senate committee approved similar legislation, with bipartisan backing, in November. But the latter version still hasn't made it to the floor for a vote by the full Senate, partly because of more pressing legislation, such as the healthcare overhaul, and partly because of concern that some lawmakers would attach amendments that would derail it.

The bill also would require food producers to implement safety plans, give FDA more access to company records and make it easier to trace the sources of contamination.

Hamburg noted the "unfortunate irony" that new rules specifically governing egg safety went into effect July 9, too late to affect the course of the outbreak.

Hamburg said she believed that had those rules been in place sooner, "it would very likely have enabled us to identify the problems on this farm before this kind of outbreak occurred."

Meanwhile, three members of Congress, concerned by the recall, are calling on the Obama administration and the companies involved to provide answers to key questions about the state of the U.S. food safety system.

In a letters to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and FDA Commissioner Hamburg, House Agriculture Appropriations Committee Chairman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) asks for details about what each knew about Wright County Egg before the egg recall began.

Separately, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wrote to the owner of Wright County Egg and the president of Hillandale to request inspection records, lists of customers who bought products within the last 12 months, communications with federal and state regulators, the companies' procedures for monitoring eggs for food pathogens and any documentation of allegations of health, safety and animal cruelty violations. The requests also apply to related companies.

Waxman and Stupak set a Sept. 7 deadline for the requested information.

Meanwhile, a survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that only half of the FDA scientists surveyed have full confidence that their organization adequately protects consumers from food-borne illness in eggs. More troubling is the fact that the survey was conducted before the recent salmonella outbreak.

The organization polled 2,874 FDA scientists this year and 17 percent (489) responded to a question about egg safety — a standard response rate for studies of this nature, UCS said.

The survey included the question: "How confident are you that the (current food safety system) adequately protects the consumer from food-borne illness from the following foods?" In the case of eggs, half of the respondents said they were completely or mostly confident in the results, while a quarter said they were somewhat confident. Five percent reported no confidence at all. The rest responded that they did not know. 

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